"I've seen scientists look at materials calculations on ASCI White and say, I knew that happened, but I couldn't prove it," Schwoegler said.
ASCI Purple is as fast as 50,000 top-of-the-line PCs performing calculations simultaneously. Its operating memory is 400,000 times greater than that of the average PC, and it can store data equivalent to the U.S. Library of Congress - 30 times over. At 100 teraflops - or 100 trillion calculations per second - it will be about eight times faster than its predecessor, ASCI White, and about three times faster than the world's current No. 1 computer, The Earth Simulator in Yokohama, Japan. That NEC-built machine was installed earlier this year, knocking IBM out of the top spot.
THE POWER OF THE HUMAN BRAIN
Hans Moravec, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, says ASCI Purple represents an important milestone for the computing industry. Twenty years ago, he predicted that computers would require 100 teraflops of calculating power to simulate the activity of the human brain. Right on the schedule he predicted, that milestone has been reached.
"It seemed astronomically large back then," Moravec said. In fact, his predictions were first published in a science fiction magazine. "I'm glad somebody remembered." Moravec's approximation is based on some observed facts - namely, the amount of computing power required to simulate the activity of the retina, which is about 1 billion calculations per second. For an approximation, he then calculated that the retina is about 1/100,000th the size of the entire brain. So he simply multiplied 1 billion times 100,000.